


This Must Be the Place

by HalfBakedPoet



Series: One Shot, Two Shot, Some Shots, Blue Box [15]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cabin Fic, Domestic Bliss, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Gardens & Gardening, In which the Doctor is a disney princess I am not sorry, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, thasmin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:21:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24700732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfBakedPoet/pseuds/HalfBakedPoet
Summary: And you're standing here beside me / I love the passing of time“D’you ever just want to get away from it all?”Yaz and the Doctor make a home.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Series: One Shot, Two Shot, Some Shots, Blue Box [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668127
Comments: 18
Kudos: 38
Collections: Sloshed Saturday





	This Must Be the Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shipper_Of_Dreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shipper_Of_Dreams/gifts).



> If you don't know the Talking Heads song in the title, I don't know what to tell you.
> 
> Gifted to my beloved friend who beta'd :)

“D’you ever just want to get away from it all?” asked Yaz one afternoon, as she and the Doctor sprawled on a blanket under the vast sky of Antario. Placid clouds floated overhead, enormous mounds of silver and tufts of white, bathed sunshine rosy.

“Mm?” The Doctor roused from dozing against Yaz’s shoulder, blinking. She shaded her eyes before letting go of Yaz’s hand to point. “Oh, look! That one’s a star whale!” A long cloud lazed by, smaller wisps and fronds skating off it.

“Are you listening?” admonished Yaz gently, nudging her forehead against the Doctor’s cheek.

“What? Oh, yeah, all the time. Why d’you think we’re always on the run?”

“But that’s it,” said Yaz, rolling onto her side to fully face the Doctor, who turned her head to meet her gaze. “I mean, d’you ever want to get away from the running?”

“Sure, we could park the TARDIS, spend some time—“

“No, I mean…” Yaz fidgeted with the Doctor’s sleeve. “Somewhere that could be ours? A… a getaway of sorts,” she mumbled as she looked down, but the Doctor lifted her chin with a soft finger.

“You’re talking about… settling?” Her eyes were a serious melted gold, little black and reddish flecks visible like sunspots in a telescope. Her question was earnest, if a little dubious, and Yaz could understand: the transient life— _lives—_ the Doctor had lived didn’t leave much room for a home base that wasn’t the TARDIS.

“It doesn’t have to be for always,” said Yaz quickly, “just when we want time to ourselves. We’re… we’re never exactly _alone_ aboard the TARDIS, are we?” It was the truth: the TARDIS did her best to give them ever-cheekier good morning chimes and hums, which always made the Doctor blush redder than Yaz. And Yaz could see all the wheels, pulleys, levers and gears whirring behind the Doctor’s eyes as she considered this, tinged pink. To Yaz, the Doctor’s mind was similar to a Rube Goldberg machine, with the marbles and dominoes and ramps, occasional toy cars and whatever else happened to be of use to churn out coherent thought.

“Brilliant point, Yaz,” said the Doctor, the final rubber ball bumping into a hammer, which fell onto a button that ignited the shine in her eyes. “I have just the thing.”

“Come on,” the Doctor laughed, guiding Yaz by the shoulders through the TARDIS door into what Yaz thought was a dense Earth forest. She’d made Yaz cover her eyes, but Yaz could smell pine, a nearby wood fire, hear the undergrowth and dry needles cracking and crushing underfoot. A stream murmured nearby. “I’ve had this saved for _ages_ , never thought I’d get to use it…”

From behind, she gently pulled Yaz’s hands away from her face. And like the pages of a well-worn book, the forest opened to a small clearing in a circle of cedar, a cabin nestled in the center. On the outside, it was a modest cottage; well constructed of glossy varnished wood dotted with knots, but a good size with plenty of windows for light, a porch with a pair of rocking chairs, and a cobbled chimney, which smoked gently. The roof was outfitted with a layer of solar panels, and a path of large, flat stones led from the front door into the woods. Yaz marveled at the way the sunlight tumbled through the trees in crisp, yellowish beams, to land in buttery pools on the porch. 

The Doctor fidgeted. “What d’you think?” And before Yaz could answer through her widening smile, the Doctor quickly added, “It’s not a palace or anything. I helped Thoreau out of a tight spot in eighteen-fifty during his anarchy phase, and he got me thinking I should get a cabin like his, only spruce it up a bit and park it in the Caledonian Forest rather than by Walden Pond. Somewhere and when no one would go looking for it. Before the deforestation, anyway. Come to think of it, I’d forgot about it until you mentioned wanting—”

But Yaz kissed her before she could say any more. “Maybe you ought to show me in before I say anything?”

“Right you are,” said the Doctor, a little breathless, her gaze faraway and dreamy. She shook her head and took Yaz by the hand to lead her inside.

Admittedly, they forgot about the cabin at first. No sooner had they finished the lengthy tour of the place than a warning whistle from the TARDIS alerted them to a planet in need two galaxies over. Which stranded them for nearly two months on a skiff in a massive, hallucinogenic bog until they found the TARDIS half-sunken in the mire, and their reunion led them to an AI battleship full of Sontarans. They managed to permanently change the ship’s course, the Doctor having befriended the interface into pacifism. And in their hurry to leave, the TARDIS whisked them into what appeared to be a magnificent, bioluminescent forest to which Yaz was so allergic, the Doctor had to carry her—eyes swollen shut and whole face puffy—into the med bay. Naturally, once Yaz had recovered and they departed quickly, they didn’t notice the TARDIS had set their course for elsewhere. 

Which landed them in the middle of a rebellion in Kantaros, platoons of government-contracted Judoon advancing on civilians. Without missing a beat and with Yaz at her heels, the Doctor cast herself into the thick of flying bricks and laser bullets, sonic aglow jamming weapons of every sort on both sides. Shepherding a group of masked children into a boarded up library, Yaz thought her heart stopped when, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted the Doctor fling her arms over her head as a street mine exploded, sending her careening into the side of another brick building.

“M’ fine,” she mumbled thickly when Yaz gathered her into her lap, nose bleeding onto Yaz’s shirt. Her brow furrowed as her eyes crossed and uncrossed. “Will be in a mo’. On’y grazed me.”

“No, you’re not,” said Yaz, looking frantically around in the muffled shouts for a medic, her ears ringing.

“Help… up?” groaned the Doctor, shuffling her feet under herself. “Can’t stay here.” She slung an arm over Yaz’s shoulders and they rose from the ground together, the Doctor limping somewhat on their way to cover.

After a week, the incident ended with the Doctor cornering the local officials, blood shining on her teeth as she snarled at them to _look_ at their starving, terrorized people, at the city they were supposed to protect, in shambles and ruin. The universe flared in her eyes, stars in supernova, and Yaz could see that spark threaten to burn the rest of the rubble down. While it didn’t always do the trick, the tacit threat was enough to force a ceasefire, dismissal of the Judoon, and resignation of the standing governors. And no sooner had Yaz and the Doctor reentered the TARDIS, than they collapsed on the floor against the console.

“You’re right, Yaz,” said the Doctor, steadying her breath. 

“Hm?” Yaz hummed, her eyelids drooping. She nodded on the Doctor’s shoulder in her sudden void of adrenaline.

“We need a break. Let’s go home.”

In association with their remote cabin, _home_ was an unusual word. For most of her life, “home” to Yaz meant her family’s flat in Sheffield, the view of the car park below her window where she could watch the TARDIS materialize. And eventually, “home” meant her room in the TARDIS, which over the months also grew to include the Doctor, bursting in at all hours with a new invention, sleepy breakfasts and teatime, the gradual transition to falling asleep and waking in the same bed together. But once they remembered to use it as a refuge, after deep space blunders and adventures, the Caledonian cabin very much became another home, with the Doctor returning the TARDIS mere moments after they’d left, so as to “keep the flow.”

While not as infinite as the TARDIS, the cabin was indeed just a bit bigger on the inside. Yaz had once thought she’d get used to the wonders of dimensional engineering, but as the Doctor explained, it was perhaps just too great a machination for a human mind to comprehend all the time. But as in the TARDIS, Yaz found herself wandering the winding halls when she couldn’t sleep, to find the Doctor staked out in the blue box, deep in the house, doors flung open as she tinkered. And the Doctor would hear her arrive in the doorway, pausing her work to give the gentlest smile, before getting up with a stretch to lead Yaz back to bed. Every so often, Yaz would stumble on an extra room, some little nook or fourth library; every part of the cabin seemingly designed for coziness with soft lighting and squashy purple sofas.

On the mornings in which Yaz woke groping into the empty space where the Doctor should have lain—true sleeping for the Doctor maybe occurred once every few weeks—she could plod into the living room, which was paneled with wall-height windows, to watch the Doctor tramping through the yard and nearby forest to forage wild mushrooms, nuts and berries. She’d return, dirt-smeared and beaming, with a mixed pocketful, which Yaz would gamely praise and attempt work into breakfast. This sometimes led to lovely truffle and herb omelets, though once or twice it resulted in an inedible mess. So they agreed keeping a garden was best in order, as Yaz was not keen to own a truffle hunting pig, and the Doctor kept turning up with pine bark, no matter how much she boasted that her nose was the most reliable and could track better than a pig.

“Does any of this even _grow ‘_ round here?” asked Yaz, rifling through a box of seed packets that varied from common Earth cabbages and carrots to a glowing starchy purple tuber that grew on Mars over ten millennia ago.

“There’s nothing I can’t make grow on Earth,” said the Doctor proudly, leafing through a gardening catalogue that featured sonic trowels and floating flowerbeds. “Got a green thumb like you wouldn’t believe, you’ve seen the rainforests in the TARDIS. And it does turn green sometimes. Mostly on bank holidays.” She stopped at a page with a self-sustaining compost bin. “Oh! We can compost, Yaz! I love compost. Nature’s recycling. Can we keep some worms in the bin as well?”

They took to preparations with gusto, installing the beds the Doctor specially imported from far off star systems. Much to the TARDIS’ chagrin, they took several trips to intergalactic gardening shops, returning with all varieties of bagged mulch, manure, and soil, which they carried together into the freshly cleared patch on the eastern side of the house, the empty garden beds a base for levitating pots waiting to be filled. Yaz caught the Doctor’s softened expression after she had tenderly mounded soil over a cluster of seeds, and, blushing, Yaz sprinkled water over her work.

Between talking to the new sprouts and otherwise tending the beds with a no-nonsense, motherly kindness, the Doctor insisted on preparing to set aside spare vegetables for the animals, which resulted in a small argument.

“You’ll attract more of ‘em to the house, won’t you?”

“They’ll go for the garden if we don’t leave them anything,” huffed the Doctor, cobbling together a trough of leftover boards. Her tongue poked out one side of her mouth.

“Doctor, they don’t know the difference. Food is food,” said Yaz, her arms crossed.

“Sure they do! Only had a chat with the deer last week, they agreed to leave well enough alone if we feed them here and there—”

“They’re _deer_ , surely they can’t reason like that.”

“You try talking to them, then, see if I’m wrong,” said the Doctor, scowling at the trough as she tightened a bolt.

A tense moment followed, the Doctor furiously hammering and drilling, Yaz incredulous as she watched, but then something about the way the Doctor’s nose rumpled when a screw got caught in a knot in the wood made her laugh.

“What?” The Doctor paused, puzzled as Yaz doubled over.

“It’s just us, isn’t it?” giggled Yaz. “Domestic, arguing over feeding wild animals.”

The sound of Yaz’s laughter melted the Doctor into a grin. “If it’ll make you feel better, we can fence in the beds.”

And as the creepers and vines flowered and fruited with the Doctor’s coaxing and chatter, they didn’t have issues with animals at all. In fact, on their walks, Yaz started noticing the way the local fauna seemed to ghost their steps: a pair of foxes peeking at them from the brush; deer and squirrels that watched them from afar; the way birds would land on the Doctor’s shoulders for a split second before flying away again. Crows and ravens had habits of bringing her twigs and berries. And Yaz caught her breath every time she found the Doctor kneeling among their lettuce and radishes under a broad, floppy sun hat, giving a family of rabbits a fond stroke and a tidbit of greens. She’d beam up at Yaz, her chin smudged, and Yaz would join her in the sunshine to help weed.

As much as the Doctor took to the cabin with her natural enthusiasm for living, Yaz still caught her subtle discomfort at the smallest things: the flicker of the corners of her mouth pulling while they washed dishes, the hard swallows at Yaz’s quiet ‘I love you’s, the flighty crease of tension between her brows when Yaz’s legs draped over her lap as they read novels on the same couch in the second library. But as always, the microexpression would pass in an instant; as soon as Yaz reached for it, for an explanation or to comfort, the Doctor would mask it with her winning smile and a kiss.

“I’m fine,” she said week after week, until she thought Yaz had forgotten the way she pressed her lips together. And it was easy to forget, when the Doctor and the TARDIS kept finding places to go and aliens in need of rescue. But as soon as they returned to the house, the Doctor’s energy dipped somewhat for a few days while she settled into the routine garden care, sandwich making, and occasionally carrying Yaz to bed as she nodded off.

Yaz could guess, though the Doctor would never confirm it herself: that the settling part most _un_ settled her, that all this—even with how secure it made Yaz feel among the trees and the privacy of having their own place—was only temporary for her. Yaz shuddered to think that she herself was only temporary to the Doctor, a thought that fled with tail tucked when the Doctor held her, or simply gazed at her like she was witnessing the birth of a star.

They’d hardly kept track of the time passing in their corner of the universe, between battles and trips across wormholes and moments in Sheffield, but soon the garden lay fallow and winter came with a heavy snow quilt and nights by the fire with hot chocolate. They’d nestle together under a blanket after a day in the cold, furious snowball fights and fort building; walks in the forest with the glittering trees bowed over into arches, mittened hand in mittened hand. Night became Yaz’s favorite time because the Doctor always ran warm, and their blanket nest only encouraged falling asleep in each other’s arms. And every morning, the Doctor always made sure to update their resident snowman family’s attire before Yaz awoke to find their newly outfitted ‘lodgers’ greeting her, the Doctor’s cheeks rosy as she packed a fresh layer onto a snow dog.

“Look, Yaz!” cried the Doctor, her voice muffled through the window, pointing at the snowmen. “I made us! The fam!” And indeed, there was a snowman with a sandwich wearing an old jacket like Graham’s, a snow Ryan in a hooded jumper, both with smiling mouths made of pebbles. The Doctor had given snow Yaz hair buns, and her stick hand seemed to hold the snow Doctor’s. She had even fitted a twig into the fork of her snow self’s free hand for a makeshift sonic.

“Who’s the dog?” asked Yaz, her breath fogging the glass.

“It’s K9!” said the Doctor, giving him a fond pat. “Technically, he’s a robot, but you never met a more loyal friend.” She wrapped her own rainbow scarf around the snow Doctor and stepped back with a satisfied nod before trudging through her path back around to the front door. 

Yaz took a moment to sketch a heart in the condensation, a little frame for the scene.

“Hard to believe it’s almost been a year,” said the Doctor, Yaz tucked against her chest in the cool dark. She nuzzled Yaz’s hair. 

“Has it?” mumbled Yaz against the Doctor’s skin, and the Doctor kissed the top of her head.

“Time’s got a way of getting away from us.”

“You’re the Time Lord,” said Yaz, smirking into the Doctor’s neck. And it wasn’t as though they’d _only_ stayed in the cabin; the Doctor insisted that the TARDIS still needed exercise on occasion, and they found themselves racing across the vortex as usual. The only difference was that they always returned home, resuming their stationary life right where they’d left it.

“Probably been more than a year overall,” admitted the Doctor, “That run to Kessel was what, a month long?”

“And the occasion with the giant fruit bats,” added Yaz. “Took probably three weeks at least.”

“I guess I mean it’s been a year for the house,” said the Doctor, her fingertips tracing idle circles on Yaz’s shoulder. “We’ve spent a year here, even if we’ve spent more time elsewhere.”

“Mm,” Yaz agreed, “What was it you said about time? Wibbly wobbly?”

“Yep.” She could hear the smile in the Doctor’s voice, and they rested in each other’s arms, skin to skin. After a moment, the Doctor took a short breath. “I wasn’t sure. At first,” she said.

“About?” Yaz kissed along the Doctor’s clavicle, to the little hollow space where her collar bones met.

“Settling. Making a home. Not after…” She trailed off, but Yaz understood: _Not after Gallifrey_.

“I know,” murmured Yaz, hugging her closer.

“It’s weird, innit? Home’s always where my TARDIS is. But it’s here now, too. With you.” There was that slow swallow. She was right: _home_ could be mutable, a flux of spaces and the people in them. Najia and Hakim did fret at first, when Yaz made the move final, loading boxes into the TARDIS. Sonya was overjoyed to _finally_ inherit Yaz’s room, though Yaz could still request a trip back to the Khan flat for dinner and a roam around Sheffield, or just to needle Sonya a little. And Ryan and Graham could still have them for tea, or the opposite, and they’d fall into familiar patterns in the TARDIS kitchen: Graham and the Doctor bantering about custard creams, Ryan pouring the milk. But very much, perhaps more than anything, _home_ meant the Doctor, snuggled against her while the owls hunted and the wind whispered outside, though perhaps the white noise was some ambient generator the Doctor had installed. Home was the life they’d built together, the good morning kisses and naps by the fire; stepping out of the TARDIS somewhere new and then setting course for the house, chatting about bringing Ryan and Graham around for a long weekend.

Yaz wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy howdy!
> 
> Just some (nearly) pure fluff that goes on for a bit, I haven't decided if I want to write another chapter because I YEARN for the Doctor's POV on this. Granted, that's a one way trip to HURTSVILLE without a seat belt. So if you've made it this far and I've added a second chapter, buckle up or leave the fic if you want to keep it light and happy like this.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Smash any buttons you like, comments are Brain Fodder for much needed serotonin and dopamine, and remember to be kind to yourselves and others!
> 
> XOJO


End file.
